Briar plays a game of hard-to-get with Caidy, which he’s cool with because flirting is fun, until it goes on long enough to be exasperating and he thinks “yeah, never mind, I just remembered trauma.”  Which…seems out of the blue, but I really like it, because that’s about how it happens.  Hanging on to what you used to enjoy after a bit of trauma really can go like that, it’s all very delicate, and something fun one moment can be utterly destroyed if it tips just a little out of balance and then suddenly you realize that the party you’re at is just a bunch of sweaty people futilely trying to pretend like this is fun while all those dead people are still dead and you put all that effort into forgetting and trying and wanting to have fun and it worked for a little, a bare little while, but then it all fell apart and you can see everything for how futile and fake it really is and you know what fuck this popsicle stand.

I don’t know what it is about this scene that makes me sympathize more than other scenes where a character does a 180.  Probably because it’s subtle enough to not feel jarring, and Briar is more exasperated and disillusioned than angsty.

So he leaves the party and goes to work in the greenhouses instead.  Berenene finds him there the next morning.  She makes another offer of employment, this time with a dukedom attached, and I’m honestly surprised that he’s not at least tempted by this point.  I mean, the boy has some supernatural humility going on.  Which is rather hot, but come on.  Not even a flicker of a maybe?

Then the chapter is full of lots of filler.  Sandry notices that Berenene is courting all her friends, they have dinner and chat a lot, Daja invites Rizu, they talk about the plot/drama so far, there’s fighting…more of the same.  Also, Tris and Sandry randomly start telepathy-ing again.  As with every instance so far, that bit fixes itself just as randomly as it was broken in the first place.

It is nice to see them reconnecting, and honestly, the scenes where the siblings start to trust each other again aren’t bad.  I think the thing that bothers me is that repairing relationships is a process, not an event, and yet the telepathy thing makes it into an on-off switch.  So while you could use each of these scenes to say “aw, that’s sweet, they’re remembering all the good stuff about being siblings,” as soon as you throw in that on-off, it just gets…far too sudden.

Also,

“It’s just that weather magic and anyone who can do more than control a wind here and there are so uncommon,”

Then why is Tris forever carrying on about doing war magic?  Heck, even earlier in this chapter, Sandry thought “Tris could be [rich], if she were willing to do battle magic” so it’s not even Tris being weird about it, everyone thinks that.  But…also she has really rare weather magic that…no one is interested in?

We summarize our way through the next two weeks until it’s time for a ball.  After a pit-stop by Landreg house to let Zhegorz drop some easter eggs, Sandry gets ready to go.  Fin shows up to escort her to the ball, and really, Fin and Jak are so interchangeable that until this moment, I kept thinking Jak was the one that does this.  I mean, neither of them have exactly stood out, and what little bits of personality they have are the same for both of them, so I keep forgetting which of them is going to kidnap her.  Well, I guess if they’re that interchangeable, it doesn’t matter.

Although now that I think about it, I wish we hadn’t gotten that villain moment with Jak-Fin-Fin earlier, because we know Fin-Jak-one of them was going to pull a stunt.  Without that, this would have come as much more of a surprise.  The mild-mannered set-dressing turns out to be bold?  Cool!  There were enough hints to make it not completely out of the blue (I noticed them upon second reading), so I think it would have worked.

Anyway, yeah, Fin kidnaps Sandry by leading her right into a chloroform rag instead of to the ball.  She wakes up trapped in a magical box and completely in the dark, which is the worst thing Fin could have done because Sandry has some pretty severe fear of the dark.  (With good reason, thanks to her history, but you’ll have to read her book to find out.)  She freaks out, but her magic doesn’t work, because Fin has connections with other mages who built him a trap to keep her contained.  Anything she tries to do with her magic doesn’t work.

After she’s done screaming herself hoarse, he shows up to taunt her.  It’s the basic “I’m going to keep you kidnapped until you marry me” thing.  Also, apparently there are spells in this country specifically designed to keep mage wives in check.  Normally I’d like to think that magic would make women harder to misogyny-ize, but it really would depend on the system, I suppose.  If it were equally distributed across genders, and if it’s not the do-whatever sort, then it makes sense that things would be closer to our own reality.  (After all, our own “power imbalances” are social constructs.)  (I still think that if women could explode heads with magic, we’d have nipped that idea in the bud way back in Fertile Valley days.)

Fin leaves, and Sandry gets down to the business of trying to figure a way out.  She finds out she can still use her connections to the other kids, because the spells around her are for thread magic, but her connection to the others has bits of their magic so they’re unaffected.  She can’t talk to Daja (closed due to reasons of sex) or Tris (in a lightning storm) so she forces her way into Briar’s head with brute yelling.  He gets mad until he realizes she’s in trouble, at which point he forgets all about the Caidy he was making out with and has a very reasonable reaction.  “Oh, shit, well, let’s get that fixed.”

Briar calls Tris down, since the storm has passed, and keeps Sandry calm by talking to her while they wait for Tris to get off the roof.  (Because Tris is always on the roof, of course.)  They follow their magic to find Sandry, make short work of her guards, and then break the box to get her out of it.  Only it’s more exciting when you read it, of course. 😛

We switch over to Berenene’s POV back at the ball, and it takes several pages of mundane details before she goes to see the other three and find out what happened.  They spill out the whole story, expect for the part about them being telepathic again.  …sorta.  When Berenene asks how Briar found her:

“I…forget,” Briar said coldly.  “I have a terrible memory when it comes to secrets I don’t wish to tell.”

…uh, yeah, that’ll really confuse them, sweetie.

Sandry announces that she’s leaving immediately because she refuses to stay in a country that allows such a horrible custom.  When Berenene tries to say that any woman worth her salt would escape like she did, Sandry gives her a right good smackdown.

“Not all women or families are strong in the same way.  They are entitled to your protection.  I will not remain in a country that withholds that protection.

I wish we’d had more focus on this, on the idea that it literally is a government’s job to protect its people, not to just stand by and said “nah, protect yourselves.”  Alas, that’s all we get, but then again they do stick to those convictions, even if they don’t keep talking about them.  I’ll take it.

I call it rape, in any country.”

Thank you, Briar. 

I mean, it was obvious enough, but with something like this, you still don’t want to pussyfoot around it.  If you avoid saying the word, there’s an air of ‘well, it’s not rape, rape is this specific set of circumstances that I’ve arbitrarily decided on.’  So, yeah, any writers out there.  Don’t shy away from calling a rape a rape.

After the three kids leave, Berenene tells her own mages to take out Tris, since she’s the magical heavy-lifter in the group.  (DAMN STRAIGHT SHE IS, THAT GIRL IS POWERFUL LIKE WOAH, YEAH!)

Then Briar goes off to have more dreams about stuff that never happened in Battle Magic.  Seriously, this book has retroactively turned into such a tease.